So, what did you see? What did you do today? What adventures did you have? How many pictures did you put on instagram?

Travelling can be exhausting. Especially when you want to live up to all the expectations that come with it. As if you're travelling to see as much as possible, to do everything, to be a completely different person.

^{Image from Pixabay-Rodrix147}

Cut to Umberto Eco

I'm reading a book.... but wait, aren't you in China right now? --> yes, one of the first things I did when I came to Shanghai was to go to the Unievrsity Library and get myself as many books as I could carry... that's the kind of person I am <-- ... written by Umberto Eco. It are actually six lectures about writing fiction. And in one of the essays he makes a point that resonates closely to me:

The Beauty of Lingering.

This is an important concept for me, both with regard to the way I think about travelling, and about my ambitions with regard to writing fiction.

Linger-travel

I like to be in places. Not to hurridly pass through, not to have a checklist and check them all. Not getting caught up in the kind of pressures we give ourselves, or that people around us put on our travelling shoulders. Instead I like to be. I like to linger. To walk around in the same neighbourhood for weeks, recognising the cats sleeping on the side of the road. saying hello to that guard who smiles friendly every day. Seeing the bats flying at dusk, and hearing the birds early in the morning before the honking and the traffic noises even seem to exist. I like to recognise places for what they are, not for the image I have made of them.

I like to linger.

See the dust settle in the corners of the hallway until the cleaning person comes by. Hear the dogs responding to the car alarm that goes off for too long. I like to linger, so that people come to talk to me and think I am local. Which perhaps won't happen in China, but it did happen in the US, in Israel, in Ukraine.

I never knew, but I prefer lingering over travelling. Staying in one random weird place for a month, instead of city hopping through a continent. I think this has to do with this longing to be, and how for me being is always connected to place, to purpose.

Linger-write

Umberto Eco described the art of lingering as an author. To allow for the narrated time to far exceed the story time, for instance. But also to not cut to the case, to allow for something to not happen. Maybe never to happen. This doesn't mean that you have to go all descriptive, and start jabbering about the birds and the bees. No, the story can actually gain something, the reader can get a new and deeper meaning from a story especially when it has taken her time to get to it. As an author you are to guide that reader through the time you've set down.

To let the reader linger in the story, also means she is allowed to bring in herself into the story. Own memories, own experiences get tied up, because the reader actually has time to recollect them, to make this emotional bridge.

Lately some editors got inpatient with my writing, telling me I should cut to the action faster, because the reader is going to be bored. Probably they are right. I was also very bored while reading Proust. Yet I still continued reading Proust. Maybe precisely because he brought to me the frustration of lingering, of pausing, of taking time to actually experience something.

And isn't that what literature should always aim for?

Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Harvard University Press, 1994.

^{Here an overview of more fiction/short stories and poetry by @nobyeni.}